Charm Quark Production in Non-central Heavy Ion Collisions

The effect of gluon shadowing on charm quark production in large impact parameter ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions is investigated. Charm production cross sections are calculated for a range of non-central impact parameters which can be accurately inferred from the global transverse energy distribution. We show that charm production is a good probe of the local parton density which determines the effectiveness of shadowing. The spatial dependence of shadowing can only be studied in heavy ion collisions.